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Welp. I've been using GitLab for over a decade and have been pretty happy with it. Deployed and maintained several instances, some personal, some for small hobby orgs, some for work.
But it looks like it is time to ditch GitLab for good:
> Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/
@rysiek There's a chance this is just some yapping about how great AI is to make investors happy.
But its best to remain cautious
@rysiek It’s really just a letter to investors isn’t it?
Software has been "built by machines, directed by people" for decades.
That's what compilers and linkers do, that's what uncountable lines of Bash and endless CI/CD pipelines are – machines building software, directed by people.
And for decades, the bottleneck has not been churning out code. It was code review, it was quality control, it was bug fixing. AI slop makes that *worse*, not better:
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367
GitLab, and the rest of the industry, is solving for the wrong problem.
they try to handle this by using multiple Agents now, and one gets the „personality“ of the reviewer, one for writing the concepts and requirements etc.
but if no human cares to thoroughly sit down and describe precisely what the real needs are that the software and its features must fulfill and how the fulfillment of these requirements can be verified (acceptance criteria) , a project will never fulfill the needs of humans or the company they work for
@lazyb0y no amount of description, however "thorough" or "precise", will be enough. Dijkstra knew this decades ago:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
The outcome of this will be *worse* software.
It will feel even more plastic, it will be even more brittle, and it's not because we don't know how to write better, more reliable software, but because the industry decided that writing better software is not how money is made.
And GitLab just went all-in, announced to the world: we're here for plastic software, we're here for shit quality code, we're here for forcing people to review unreviewable slop and then blaming them for the bugs.
The push for this is about labor, and is about power. CEOs all around the world have wet dreams of never having to pay people ever again. Of never having to hire people.
Slaves would be good though.
And AI "agents" is the closest CEOs can get to slaves. The next closest thing are employees that are too terrified of getting fired to stand up for themselves.
No surprise, then, that in this same blogpost, in the same breath, GitLab's CEO announced layoffs.
GitLab's CEO writes:
> Humans still own the judgment that matters most: architecture, deep understanding of the customer problem, the tradeoffs that require taste.
I hold judgement over this decision.
I see it as a symptom of lack of understanding of how good software is actually built. And of greed, directed by the hype train and FOMO.
And I find this blogpost, and the whole idea of pushing slop generators tasteless.
And if you've read that far and you're in IT, I have one word for you: unionize. ✊
@rysiek was a union man before I got into IT, and will be a union man when they put me in the ground.
@rysiek Yeah, they made worrying noises last year. Guess the mask is fully coming off now. I've been mentally (and somewhat practically) preparing a move to Forgejo for a while for stuff I control.
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